


second button

by scionblad



Series: the village atop the hill [6]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Brotherly Affection, Character Study, Flashbacks, Gen, Post-Recall, Young Genji Shimada, Young Hanzo Shimada
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 11:00:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15193337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scionblad/pseuds/scionblad
Summary: “God, like. Was he always like that?” she grumbled.“Like what?”She made a face. “Y’know… Like he had a stick up his ass."——D.VA asks Genji what Hanzo was like in high school.





	second button

**Author's Note:**

> the flimsiest excuse to just write platonic shimada fluff
> 
> additionally: i do not fucking condone shimadacest please do not think this is in any way shape or form shimadacest
> 
> the title comes from the japanese tradition? superstition? of confessing by giving your crush the second button from your gakuran school uniform, because it symbolizes giving someone your heart. i realize that makes it sound like i condone shimadacest but I REALLY DONT I SERIOUSLY DONT. fuck
> 
> EDITED 15 JULY 2018

There was noise coming from the kitchen at nine at night—some people yelling, the clinking of glasses. From where they were, on the roof overlooking the west side of Gibraltar, it was faint, but the fact that they could hear it at all meant the ruckus was impressively loud.

Jesse gave Genji a sideways look. “Never quiet around here,” he remarked, his cigarillo wiggling inside his mouth.

“It was not quiet back then either,” Genji laughed.

“You’re right about that one,” said Jesse. He took the cigarillo out and raised a bottle to his lips, then frowned. “Empty.”

“I can get some more,” said Genji. Jesse raised an eyebrow.

“You sure about that?”

“Sure.” Genji grinned. “I can handle myself. It could not be any worse than what happened back in Blackwatch.”

“That,” said Jesse with an unamused look, “was not a funny joke.”

“It is all in the past, now.” Genji stood up. “I will be right back.”

He was gone before Jesse could make another protest, scaling down the walls easily and running quicker than a normal human could, stopping just short of the base entrance. There was still yelling but it was mostly one-sided now, one voice whose owner he knew definitively. With an inkling of curiosity, he reached out to the kitchen door handle.

It swung open before him, bouncing off his face and chest and toe. He stumbled backwards, hissing in pain.

“Oh, Genji,” said Hana. “Sorry.”

She pushed past him, an angry pout on her face, the door swinging shut behind her. Genji rubbed his face until it stopped throbbing.

Hana had been the one yelling earlier, for sure. It was not at all unusual to see fits of temper from her on occasion—but Genji had not heard anything so ferocious from her since they met. Even now he could hear her stomping off towards the bunks, presumably to stream or blow steam off with a few rounds of a shooting game, or maybe a quick hack-and-slash game.

As it was, he still had a mission. He opened the door again, tentatively, lest another person come bursting out of the kitchen angry like Hana.

At the noise of the door opening, Hanzo glanced up with eyes like a wounded dog, hostile—but slumped back over his glass of clear liquid once he saw who it was.

“Oh,” he said. “Genji.”

He reached a heavy hand over to the large green bottle next to him and poured more liquid into his glass. The kitchen smelled like alcohol and sterile loneliness, musty in the wake of Hana’s screaming match with Hanzo. Genji stood at the door, wordlessly watching his brother hold the bottle, his hand steady as always, until the liquid reached the brim.

“Did you do something to upset her?” he asked. Hanzo moved his hand over the glass, his hair drooping low over his brow.

“No,” he said.

Typical. There was no point in pushing the topic when Hanzo’s moody silence smothered them both out of words. Genji moved around the table to the large black refrigerator behind Hanzo and opened it.

He found the beer behind the asparagus and a plastic container marked “HANA” in bold marker writing. The bottles clinked as he took them out.

“Genji,” said Hanzo suddenly, the tone of his voice switching to the clean clipped syllables of Japanese. “Do you… not want sake?”

He was looking at Genji almost nervously—he hid emotion well, but Genji wasn’t his brother for nothing—his hand already reaching for the large green bottle again.

“These are for Jesse.” Genji smiled. “But thank you, brother.”

 _“Anija,”_ Hanzo corrected automatically, before clenching his jaw tight like he’d done something he shouldn’t have.

“Anija,” echoed Genji with a half-grin. “I know.”

Hanzo grunted into his glass and finished off the sake inside it.

“It’s late, you know,” said Genji. “You should go sleep soon.”

“Not my babysitter,” muttered Hanzo in their mother tongue.

“Just saying,” said Genji, and he turned around to leave, Hanzo simmering with unexpressed emotions.

He went out back onto the roof, climbing and jumping, the wind on his face. Jesse raised an eyebrow.

“Well?” he said.

“D.VA and my brother,” said Genji, settling down and handing a beer to Jesse, “seemed like they were fighting. Or disagreeing.”

“They don’t seem to get along, do they,” said Jesse. “Song’s a lil’ spitfire. And your brother…”

“He’s not a people person.”

“That’s not what I was going to say but it more or less sums it up.” The beer bottle popped open with a soft _hiss._ “Anyway, I’m thinking maybe you should go talk to her.”

Genji made a surprised noise. “Hana-chan?”

“She doesn’t have too many friends around here,” said Jesse. He took a deep swig and let out a satisfied sigh. “And you know best what it’s like to deal with that mess of a brother of yours.”

Genji grunted in agreeance. “He’s not a bad person, but…”

Jesse laughed, leaning back to lie down and watch the stars. “Genji, you’re the only person who thinks that.”

“Well…”

“Have you seen how he treats everyone else here?” Jesse blew smoke rings into the night air. “Last week Angela tried to talk to him about his alcohol intake and he just blew her off in the rudest way possible.”

Genji chuckled. “That does sound like him.”

“I get it,” said Jesse. “And Angela gets it. But Song probably doesn’t. Go talk to her. I’ll be fine out here,” he added.

“If you insist.”

“I do.”

“Don’t fall asleep out here like last time.”

“That was one time, Genji. One time!”

Laughing, Genji swung himself over the ledge and landed into a roll, then dashed towards where the bunks were. Hana’s room was near his own, marked with a simple name tag, and a sticker of the bunny icon she so often used.

The door was closed. He knocked, three sharp raps.

The furious clicking of buttons. “Who is it?”

“Genji.”

A few buttons clicking, and then quick footsteps. He looked down. Hana stood, her weight on one leg, tinges of frustration still in the set of her mouth and her eyes.

“What do you want?” she asked, too tired to really be a question.

“I was wondering how you were holding up,” said Genji.

“I’m fine,” said Hana, moving to close the door. He put a foot in front of it.

“I have beer.”

She eyed him. “Sapporo?”

“Hite.”

The door swung open wide. He sat down somewhere between the stacks of comic books and the piles of gaming controllers. There was a small, low table, not unlike the kind he might’ve seen once in Hanamura’s tatami mat rooms, which was littered with half-empty chip bags and empty boxes of instant food.

How nice it must be to be nineteen, he mused with a small smile.

“Korean beer,” said Hana suspiciously as she sat down across from him. “Where’d you get it?”

“They had some nearby,” said Genji offhandedly. “I find it all right.”

She popped the bottle cap off with the side of the table and took a swig. “Oh man,” she sighed. “Just like home.”

They sat there for a moment, drinking, until Hana sighed.

“Okay don’t take this the wrong way, because I like you and respect you, but,” she slumped over the table, rubbing her forehead. “Your brother’s a _dick.”_

“He does tend to come off that way to people he doesn’t know well,” said Genji, chuckling.

“Oh _come on,_ it’s more than that.” Hana let out an angry huff. “I asked for a little bit, and he was like ‘you shouldn’t be drinking, little girl,’ like, I’m legal, it’s not like it’s his personal sake, he’s drinking in the fucking kitchen!”

She slammed her beer down with more force than Genji thought she’d had.

“God, like. Was he _always_ like that?” she grumbled.

“Like what?”

She made a face. “Y’know… Like he had a stick up his ass.”

“Maybe,” said Genji contemplatively. “He definitely looked like it in all the photos.”

A hand grabbed hold of his forearm. He looked at it, surprised—it was Hana’s hand.

“Photos?” Hana’s eyes glinted with a certain kind of excitement he hadn’t seen before. “Genji, now you _have_ to show me.”

“Eh?”

“I _have_ to see this,” she said, squeezing with a grip more fearsome than he’d expected. _“Please.”_

He swallowed down a laugh. “I guess there’s no harm.”

She whooped with glee. “I can’t wait to see awkward loner old man as a teenager!”’

She practically danced on their short walk to Genji’s room, looked curiously at the painting of the two brothers, the robe he once wore draped on a stand, the swords that he cared for in their sheaths. Genji rummaged around for photos, old ones, so old that they were physical instead of holographic, like most photos were nowadays.

His fingers brushed against a framed photo. Young Hanzo grimaced at the camera, his hair long and his arms crossed, while a Genji from another lifetime smirked confidently.

“Ah,” he said. “Here. This was when I was twenty.”

Hana took the photo hesitantly. “That’s a terrible dye job.”

“I was young. Just like you are now.”

She rolled her eyes, ignoring him, still studying the photo. “Who’s that with you?”

“Hanzo.”

Her gaze flicked up to him in surprise, then she looked at the photo again, holding it out at arm’s length, holding it inches away from her face, tilting it this way and that. “Did he always have that ugly long hair?”

“See for yourself.” He laid out all the photos he could find on the floor. They sat down cross-legged, bottles of beer in hand, and she sorted through them with all the scrutiny she could muster.

“Man, who’d’ve thought that Hanzo was actually good-looking when he was young?” said Hana. “I mean, aside from that ugly hairstyle.”

Genji burst out laughing.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “We’re all thinking it. Why’s it so funny to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Genji, swiping through the photos. Hanzo glaring from under cherry blossoms on the first day of school, Hanzo glaring with high school diploma in hand, Hanzo glaring with kyuudo uniform and a small plaque. “Perhaps I just remember him to not be much different from now.”

“What? Mean? Stick up his ass? Didn’t talk to anyone?”

He couldn’t help another chuckle. “Dependable. And above all else, kind to those he cared for.”

 

 

 

 

Genji climbed the chain link fence between their middle school and their high school sometimes, when he needed to borrow lunch money from Hanzo. It happened more often than not; Genji was never too concerned about having pocket change on him at all times, despite their mother and the servants telling him off, and he could always rely on his dependable big brother to lend him a few hundred yen on days when they sold chicken cutlets.

Every day, without fail, Hanzo could be found sitting on the bench facing the fence between their middle school and their high school, like he was waiting for something—waiting, even, for Genji to sail over the fence with ease and a gleeful shout.

He was always alone, his big brother, reading outside, a strand of hair escaping his neat ponytail to hang over his brow. None of the girls ever talked to him, nor the boys; he was popular in looks and academic excellence only. In the summer he’d have the short-sleeved shirt buttoned up behind a striped tie; if it was cold, he’d be wearing his jacket—a blazer, for high schoolers, not like Genji’s gakuran jacket with the bright shiny buttons on the front—hunched over the small book, sometimes textbook, sometimes novel, sometimes a notebook with an essay he was writing inside it.

Today, it was chilly but bright outside, and the spring cherry blossoms trickled down onto his hair as he scribbled some homework that was probably due two weeks from now. He really looked like some prince out of a comic for girls.

Genji looked left, right, for any teachers that might be looking, then began his ascent. The fence rattled as he climbed, quickly like he scaled the walls at home—chain link was easy compared to the smooth brick—and with a grunt, he launched himself over.

“Brother,” Genji huffed— _aniki_ , not _anija_ —crashing down onto the ground with a roll and a final rattle from the fence. “They have chicken cutlet sandwiches today. I need money.”

“ _Anija_ ,” Hanzo corrected with a lazy page flip, and a twirl of his pen, a few more words on the page.

“Doesn’t matter, out here,” said Genji stubbornly. “No one can see us.”

“You should still do it,” said Hanzo.

“Who cares? It means the same thing,” said Genji. He held out a hand. “Five hundred yen, _please_.”

Hanzo went still, then, his right hand which had been composing an essay stopped mid-kanji stroke. He looked at Genji, his expression a strange mix of emotions Genji didn’t quite understand. For a moment, he just stared. Genji huffed a grunt of impatience.

“ _Brother_ ,” he said— _nii-chan_.

Hanzo’s gaze flickered down to his essay. Maybe he decided it wasn’t that important, because he closed the notebook and stood up.

“My money’s in my bag in the classroom,” he said shortly. “I’ll be right back.”

“Hurry!” Genji called after his back. “Or they’ll sell out!”

Dependable, dependable big brother.

 

 

 

 

“There was another note in Shimada-kun’s locker today,” said one of the schoolgirls sitting behind him. “Did you hear?”

“Oh, who was it this time? Amagi-san?”

“Kanamoto-san?”

“Nanase-san?”

“Nanase-san and Shimada-kun?” More giggling. “I can’t imagine that one at all!”

“It doesn’t matter, actually, because he rejected her behind the school and she ran away, crying—Mika-chan saw the whole thing!”

Gasps. The tonkotsu came. Genji tucked in.

“Shimada-kun is so cold, that’s the third girl he’s turned down!”

“What a shame, he is so handsome, don’t you think? Those mature eyes and shapely mouth and long soft black hair, he really looks like a prince!”

The schoolgirls all tittered behind their bowls, murmuring agreeance.

“What’s his skincare routine? He almost never has any gross spots or pimples. Like his face is glowing all the time.”

“And his eyebrows! So strong and dark.”

“What a shame!” And they all laughed again, until one of them, a particularly nasal voice, spoke up.

“Maybe it’s for the better. Have you seen his father? He’s yakuza for sure, no question about it.”

“Hush!” One of the older girls put her chopsticks down. “You shouldn’t say that! Someone might hear you!”

And they all swiveled their heads around to look at Genji. He stared right back, mid-slurp, one eyebrow raised, an unspoken challenge.

They hurried out quickly after that, leaving a few bills on the counter in their wake. Genji finished his ramen, drinking the soup even though it had gone cold. Cold, cold Shimada-kun. Cold, cold big brother.

The sky was burning orange when he left. Hanzo was already waiting in their shared room when he got home, changed out of his school uniform and into a leaf-patterned yukata, sweat on his brow from the ache of holding a bow drawn. When Genji slid open the door, he put his book down and stood up.

“Hey,” he said, tossing a towel and a yukata at him. “Mother said we have to take a bath.”

“I don’t need to,” said Genji, annoyed. “I just got home.”

“Yeah you do,” said Hanzo. “You stink. I can smell it all the way from over here.”

“No, you can’t!”

Hanzo crossed the room in three swift strides and grabbed Genji’s ear, eliciting a yelp from the younger brother. “Yeah, I can. And you smell worse up close, so let’s go.”

They slipped out the smaller entrance—going out the big front gate was always too conspicuous, and Hanzo always said he didn’t want to attract more attention than he needed to—and made their way to the bathhouse, slippers slapping against the soles of their feet. It was warm outside, and Genji rolled up the sleeves of his yukata until they were resting just past his shoulders.

“Don’t do that,” said Hanzo. “You’re just going to take it off.”

Genji frowned. “But I’m just gonna be hot until then.”

“The bath water’ll be hot.”

“But I’ll be naked!”

Hanzo shook his head with an exasperated sigh as they entered the bathhouse. “C’mon,” he said, holding open the small locker door. “Put your clothes in.”

They scrubbed their hair and armpits and toes and Hanzo said, “Don’t forget behind your ears—that’s always the grossest.” Genji stuck his tongue out at him.

“How old are you? Sticking your tongue out?” Hanzo wrinkled his nose. “Do all middle schoolers do that?”

“Shut up!” Genji pushed Hanzo, and he stumbled backwards, landing in the bath, splashing everyone around them. Heads turned to look, and Genji froze in shame.

Hanzo surfaced from the water, his hair soaked and clinging to his face like clumps of seaweed. Then he looked at Genji.

“It’s on,” he said with a half-grin, and with a great swoop of his arms, water splashed Genji where he stood.

Giggling, Genji ran in, his hands splashing and slapping and dripping as much of the bath water as he could into his brother. Hanzo laughed too—a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time.

When they got home a servant had told their mother of what had happened, and their mother scolded them and sent them to their room to think about what they had done. But it didn’t feel nearly as bad as watching his older brother glide stony-faced through life, when their earliest youth had been of laughter and play-fighting and splash fights like he’d had just then.

Stick up his ass, maybe. But.

 

 

 

 

“He’s just,” Genji paused, thinking. “He’s had a hard life. Him and me both.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that he’s kind of an asshole,” said Hana. “I know his type. People like him play the worst kind of character, don’t pull their weight on the team, and refuse to switch off to a better character.”

“Well,” said Genji. “You aren’t wrong. ”

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, Hanzo came home with fingers rubbed raw and hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. Kendo, he said.

He did too many clubs, thought Genji. Why bother with kendo at school when they already practiced at home on weekends and over holidays? And not just kendo—but judo, karate, aikido, swimming, rock climbing, archery, throwing stars, everything under the sun. By the age of thirteen Genji had learned enough to subdue men twice his size quicker than he could blink, and yet there was more.

They were like games, really. Just like in physical education at school. Run the fastest, score the most, jump the highest—it all came very naturally. He knew what to do better than most of the other kids his age.

So did Hanzo, more or less. But Hanzo trained longer than they asked him to, new bruises blossoming on his hands and arms and legs with every passing day. When school was in session he trained on Sundays, but on summer holidays he would train once every single day.

What a diligent son, they said. Genji never saw any acknowledgement of the praise from his stern brother. It was simply his duty, he said. It simply something he had to do. Summer meant bettering his hands and body to attain the strength he would need someday to lead the clan. Summer was standing on the east side of the estate shooting arrows tirelessly at the haystacks set up there, sweating and tanning, hair tied away from the face. Summer was practicing one kick one thousand times, until the muscles ached in a way that meant they had grown. Summer was sword swinging from sunup to sundown until calluses lined the palms and pads of his hands and fingers from the friction.

Summer, though, for the other brother, meant climbing the walls of Shimada Castle in the ways he had been taught to by his elders to escape and spend long days in the arcade achieving every possible high score he could get, eating a ramen dinner with his friends, and buying popsicles from the convenience store and squatting by the side of the street playing games on their phones while the sweet frozen treats stuck out the sides of their mouths. Summer was freedom. Summer was wandering back slowly to the castle, climbing through the large openings above the gates, sneaking around the sides so no one would see him, and climbing back up the window to the room he and Hanzo shared.

Summer for Genji was the stern look he earned from his elder brother and a softly but severely spoken “Why did you skip training?”

Genji was still catching his breath from the climb. He wiped the sweat of exertion off his forehead and sighed. “Didn’t feel like it.”

Hanzo’s hands stilled, one hand holding the small nail clipper and the other gripping his foot on the fleshy parts beneath the toes. “But you have to,” he said.

“But I didn’t, and it’s fine. Besides,” Genji added carelessly, “I’m good enough, anyway, so it’s not like I need more training.”

“The point,” Hanzo began, “of _training_ is not to work yourself up to a certain level and then stay there, but to continue to hone the mind and body—maintaining. Like cleaning and sharpening a sword.”

He kept going, but Genji yawned loudly to interrupt him. “Whatever,” he said, and ignoring Hanzo’s heated glare, he flopped down onto the futon and pulled out his phone. It wasn’t like the whole  _ legacy  _ thing was going to be his, anyway. As long as Hanzo could do it all, nothing else mattered.

Hanzo’s heated glare burned on his skin for a moment longer, as if he still had more to say, more things Genji didn’t want to listen to.

That was the thing. They were stubborn dragon brothers both, not willing to listen to the other—and what did it matter? All Genji needed to know was already known. Hanzo would take over. Genji would do something else. Find himself, maybe. Travel the world. Beat the high scores at the arcade only around the corner from the front gates.

He did his best to ignore Hanzo’s simmering. It was distracting. Behind his closed eyes he could see the whirling combos of the fighting games, and he was trying to read all the moves. Just the same as everything else he learned and trained when he was with the elders.

No need for training, he thought. No need.

 

 

 

 

When Hanzo was nineteen, their father decided he should begin his initiation into the clan proper. He was out of high school, now, and it was the time.

He did not sleep often at the same time as Genji anymore. The nights became restless without his older brother’s soft snoring to lull him to dreams. Meetings with the lieutenants and captains and patriarchs stretched long hours that the futon next to him, set out by the servants, often lay untouched that he was awake to see.

There were whispers about—and Hanzo himself said very little of it, but—of the day that he might formally, ritually, become part of the family. Sometimes Hanzo spent nights muttering to himself in their room, practicing the elaborate way to speak before taking the sake and drinking it; sometimes Hanzo spent nights working for the clan, coming back smelling like smoke and tile games, sometimes Hanzo spent nights simply sleeping after bathing, his hair strewn everywhere, his skin angry and red from the linework that had started crawling across his back.

It was a sure waste, said all the schoolgirls at Rikimaru over their bowls of ramen, a shame for Hanzo Shimada to be a yakuza—he was so studious, so athletic, so princely, surely someone like that would go far in university, but alas.

It was a sure shame, said all the teachers at their high school, their eyes settling stonily on Genji’s green hair, newly retouched. Shame that the elder Shimada couldn’t have gone to university; this little Shimada won’t get far.

He didn’t care. He didn’t. The dragons would carry him forwards on the wind, laughing and whistling around the mountain.

When a Shimada began getting his tattoos, that was when he could begin to hear the dragons. They only went to one family of tattooists in Hanamura, which had been around for decades, inking patriarch after patriarch of dragons, some blue, some green, always one of the great dragon brothers.

Hanzo never said which one he had gotten, north or south,  or which dragons he heard when he drew the bowstring back or slid a sword out of its sheath. Genji strained, in the night, listening for it, wondering if the dragons might come off Hanzo’s skin and whisper to him too. He had never seen them in action proper—their father spoke always, of their magnificent blue color, luminescent and transfixing, as they swam through the air around his sword. Only a Shimada could control the dragons. In another’s hands they went mad with recklessness.

Genji could only hear the revelry of his brother’s proper induction into the clan from his distant bedroom. There was a room in the far back of the estate, where the shrine was hidden, where the members of the clan might gather, and witness Hanzo and their father drinking sake together, with _Sojiro_ written in black ink on the cup. They would provide offerings of incense, fish, fruit. Hanzo had only gone out to catch the fish earlier today—a large one and a small one, a parent and a child. Afterwards they all went out to the bathhouse, and undress and show each other the animals and flowers engraved on their skins, the mark of their wealth and virtue. Then, clean from the bath, they would feast and drink until the sleepiness of the sale overwhelmed them, and they would retire to all the tatami-lined rooms hat the Shimada Castle had, the chatter slowly dying down until there was nothing but distant footsteps and the occasional sliding door.

It was late by the time most of the noise had died out. He still couldn’t sleep. Hanzo hadn’t come back yet. His older brother had a tendency to snore sometimes, like a distant buzz of the earth shaking, and Genji disliked how quiet the room was without it.

He slid open the window to let the summer breeze in so it might brush against the chimes they hung on the topmost frame. They almost sounded mournful. Genji rolled back onto his side, facing out to the courtyard, an arm tucked under his head.

His stomach ached with emptiness. He hadn’t eaten since the last onigiri he’d snatched from the kitchen, and that was hours ago, when the sun was high in the sky. They didn’t allow him to feast with the other members of a clan—he wasn’t the one becoming a man. He wasn’t the one drinking sake with their father. He wasn’t the one who wore the dragons on his arm, even if they were only lines, with the faintest spark of life.

The door slid open. Genji started and sat up in a flurry.

It was Hanzo, his breath faintly smelling like alcohol, his hair slicked from sweat.

“I’m back,” he said.

“Welcome back,” said Genji reflexively.

Hanzo stripped his kimono off, and collapsed on the second futon that had been laid out beside Genji’s. He said nothing.

Genji desperately wanted to ask him what it was like—but _what,_ he didn’t know where to start, and the words stuck in his mouth, crowded all over themselves, his lips sealed as if to tell them it wasn’t the time, it wasn’t appropriate.

Before he could say anything, his stomach growled, loudly.

Hanzo opened his eyes and turned his head. “Did you eat?” he asked softly in the darkness.

Genji stared, then slowly and in a voice so small he hadn’t known it could go that small, said, “No.”

With much effort, Hanzo sat up, stretched, and reached into his closet to take out a crinkling package. Genji squinted to make out the words on the packaging— _ramen._

“I’ll go make it,” said Hanzo sleepily. “You stay here.”

And he went, only throwing on a yukata and not bothering to even tie it closed. It was only ten minutes that Genji lay there, waiting for Hanzo to come back, and when the noodles came he slurped them up with a gusto that made Hanzo laugh, a small one, but one as warm as the soup he’d made.

Genji polished the bowl clean, drank the soup and ate every last bit of noodle. The ramen tasted like all the things they never said to each other, and it filled him with a feeling so comfortable he leaned back in his futon and closed his eyes to sleep.

“Thanks for the meal,” he mumbled sleepily.

He could hear Hanzo rustling in his own futon beside him.

“Anytime.”

They slept soundly that night, two brothers of the winds, north and south.

 

 

 

 

Hana was still in his room when he woke up.

Genji blinked, and then sat up, his joints creaking softly, still cold from disuse. He checked the time—five thirty-seven in the morning.

She was on the floor, curled up on her side, a stray blanket that was pink and had bunnies all over—so not one of his—was thrown on top of her torso. The photos they were looking through last night were still strewn about.

“Hana,” he whispered softly. “Hana, wake up.”

She grunted something that sounded like “ _Dad, leave me alone.”_

He bit back a laugh and mentally reminded himself to remember that for the next time they drank, and carefully prodded her with a foot. “Hana, it’s five-thirty. Go back to your own room.”

Her eyes fluttered open a little more definitively this time, and then wide open when she saw where she was. “Oh, _fuck,”_ she muttered. “Shit, piece of fuck-ass motherfucking shit.”

“C’mon, it’s fine,” he said, but she brushed off his arm and stood up.

“I can do it,” she mumbled. “I can go. Back to my room. By myself.”

She stumbled to the door, her blanket around her shoulders, and flung open the door.

“Fuck!” she yelled.

“Hana, be quiet, you’ll wake up the whole Watchpoint,” said Genji.

“No, look, _look!”_

It was a bottle of sake. Genji craned his neck to read the label. It was the same brand as the one he’d seen Hanzo drinking last night.

He couldn’t help it. He started laughing.

Hana stared. “Is this? Is _this?”_

“His way of apologizing,” he said, between chortles.

“He was _eavesdropping?”_

Genji shrugged, his eyes still crinkled in a grin. “Ninja family.”

She groaned. “I hate you both.”

Hanzo showed no sign of acknowledging his gift, or his eavesdropping, but it didn’t really matter either way. He had always been like that for as long as Genji had known him, and he wasn’t about to change. That was the charm, really.

Dependable, dependable big brother.


End file.
